Now that the Super Bowl’s over, let’s revisit that steamy gay football romance from “Queer as Folk”

Confession: I’ve seen the incredibly cringe Showtime series “Queer as Folk” more times than I can count. The show—adapted from the UK original created by Russell T Davies in 1999—concerned a group of (all white, all cis) gays living in Pittsburgh and navigating their 30s. It was not very good, but it was all we had, and somehow, I not only watched it until the bitter end, I keep on watching it.

Embarrassing as that is to admit, it means I come to the table with a complete and detailed knowledge of every absurd plot twist, character arc, and bad joke that ever made its way through that fabled writer’s room—including one very steamy arc including a closeted football player and the show’s most femme character, Emmett Honeycutt.

Things kick off in Season 4: Emmett (Peter Paige) is at this point running his own catering business, and one of his clients, a straight woman named Sierra, is engaged to the impossibly butch football star Drew Boyd. Boyd, played by real-life footballer Matt Battaglia, is chiseled, monosyllabic, and basically the archetype of the jock bully come to life. When Emmett caters Sierra and Drew’s engagement party, Drew makes a homophobic comment about Emmett’s obvious queerness. And Emmett, of course, won’t take this lying down.

Not one to be bullied, shamed, or silenced, Emmett lets Drew have it in front of his football friends.

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Emmett puts Drew right in his place, and then promptly leaves the function. When he comes back a few days later to pick up his check, however, he gets a moment alone with Drew. And things get very hot, very quickly.

The two end up hooking up, and it’s not just a one-time thing, either. For weeks, Drew and Emmett meet at the same hotel room far from the prying eyes of Drew’s fiancee. Talk about a sneaky link!

There’s just one problem: Drew is deep in the closet. Any time Emmett tries to get him to acknowledge his attraction to men, he denies it.

“I’m not a f*g,” Drew tells Emmett. “F*gs are sissies, girls, pansies. You think I’m that?”

Emmett explains that you don’t have to be femme to be gay, because this show takes place in 2005 and apparently such things need to be explained. But Drew isn’t having it.

“Name one f** every kid wants to grow up to be,” he says. To which Emmett responds: “Harvey Fierstein?”

As you can imagine, it’s a pretty uncomfortable fling for Emmett, even if he is having tremendously hot sex with a star quarterback. And because the word “bisexual” basically doesn’t exist in the “Queer as Folk” universe, Drew is simply seen as a self-loathing gay man trapped in the closet.

Eventually, Drew does come out, helped along by Emmett, who acts as his friend, lover, and support system after his outing by the press causes him to lose almost everything: his position on the team, his shot at the Super Bowl, and his engagement to Sierra. 

It’s Drew’s love for Emmett that keeps his strong throughout, and after the tabloids start spreading the “rumor” that Drew is gay, he goes on a talk show to take the narrative into his own hands. The talk show he appears on happens to be on the same network where Emmett does a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” spinoff segment.

With Emmett looking on, Drew comes out and claims him with an on-air kiss. And everyone is astonished. “I’ve always thought of you as a man’s man,” Drew’s interviewer says, as if you can’t be gay and a man’s man at the same time. Because once again: 2005.

It’s important to point out that all this happens in Season 5, the same season that introduces the controversial “Proposition 14”, the show’s fictionalized answer to Prop 8, which threatens to take away gay marriage, adoption, insurance access, and partnership rights. When Drew comes out, he’s showing the world that there isn’t one way to be gay. And in 2005, strange as it may seem, that was something people needed to hear.

Because that’s the other cringe aspect of “Queer as Folk.” It’s a show that fully ignores trans narratives, as well as the stories of queer and trans people of color, in order to make a bid for respectability. Drew Boyd’s storyline mattered because it showed the straight world that anyone—your favorite action hero, your star linebacker, your “straight-passing” friend—could be queer. For the time, it was big news. And as someone who remembers how threatened straight people were before Prop 8, it brings a lot of those memories back.

Almost 15 years before Carl Nassib became the first active NFL player to come out, Drew Boyd gave us the screen kiss of our dreams. It didn’t matter that it came at the expense of so much else: at the time, it was powerful and real.

Today, it’s hard to justify a lot of the choices “Queer as Folk” made: so much so that we got a brand new reimagining of the show last summer. But before we had stars like Lil Nas X and JoJo Siwa or shows like “Heartstopper” and “Euphoria,” we had the impossibly ripped Drew Boyd telling Emmett—and the world—that more important than being a “man’s man” is being your own man: unapologetic, out, and proud.